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Amnesty International accuses Australia of ‘war crimes’ in fight against Islamic State

Jul 12

Australia has committed war crimes in Iraq as the second-largest contributor to the US-led coalition fighting Islamic State, according to an Amnesty International report.

While Iraq and the United States have claimed victory over IS in Mosul, thousands of bodies still lie in the pulverised ruins.

Almost one million people have fled. The Iraqi Army has lost up to 40 per cent of its attack force. Estimates of the number of civilians killed range over 13,000. The exact number will never be known.

Amnesty International spokesperson Diana Sayed told The New Daily the 225kg bombs dropped into the crowded streets of Mosul had a shock radius of 230 metres and resulted in needless casualties.

“Pro-government forces, including Australia, failed to take feasible precautions to protect civilians during the battle for west Mosul – through launching barrages of indiscriminate, disproportionate and otherwise unlawful attacks, and failing to provide adequate warnings prior to bombardments. The realities of living under the Islamic State often meant people were trapped and unable to leave their homes,” she said.
“Australia and its allies in Iraq should publicly acknowledge the massive loss of lives during the Mosul operation.”

The report, titled ‘At Any Cost: The Civilian Catastrophe in West Mosul, Iraq’, said Iraqi and US forces did not meet humanitarian law requirements.

“Iraqi government and US-led coalition forces failed to adequately adapt their tactics to these challenges – as required by international humanitarian law – with disastrous consequences for civilians. Pro-government forces relied heavily upon explosive weapons with wide area effects. These weapons wreaked havoc in densely populated west Mosul, where large groups of civilians were trapped.”

If military planners were unaware of the likely civilian toll, it quickly became evident.

“It was pro-government soldiers who assisted in countless front-line rescues, digging bodies out of collapsed buildings, separating the injured from the dead and arranging the transport of thousands to medical facilities,” the report said.

High Commissioner for the United Nations Human Rights Office, Zeid Al Hussein, said he urged the coalition to comply with humanitarian laws.

“I repeatedly called on coalition partners to ensure that military operations complied with international humanitarian law,” he said in a statement this week.

“Airstrikes were a significant factor in causing civilian casualties.”

The Amnesty International report came in the days after Human Rights Watch argued there had been major breaches of international law in its ‘Civilian Casualties Mount in West Mosul: Coalition’ report.

The group has also reported on mass graves in government-controlled areas, indicating war crimes.

A spokeswoman for the group Belkis Wille told The New Daily: “All of the families I speak to have a story about neighbours, loved ones or friends being killed in airstrikes. The people coming out of west Mosul are the most traumatised I have ever interviewed.”

Experts warn that Islamic State, far from being defeated, have created a major jihad spectacle which will drive recruitment.

Security expert Professor Clinton Fernandes told The New Daily: “While the public is generally unaware of most US military operations, since the media has largely been scrubbed clean of this kind of coverage, radical groups rely on satellite TV and the internet to get a different message out.”

Terror expert Dr Clarke Jones told The New Daily the deaths of so many civilians could drive extremism.

“Here is another case where the West has stepped in and caused the death of innocents. There are a lot of angry people. They see this injustice and want to take action,” he said.

One of their reporters, George Arbuthnott has informed me that an incident I wrote about in SPIN ZHIRA corroborates some of their own findings with regards to one such alleged assassination in 2012. This took place in Rahim Kalay, a small, poppy dependent rural community east of Gereshk where the British had established a patrol base.

At the time the village was on the front line of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) counter-insurgency, making it a very dangerous and violent place to live. Abandoned by the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan shortly after the British withdrawal from Helmand in 2014, it now falls under Taliban shadow governance. Ironically, this makes it a much safer and less violent place to live.

The Sunday Times investigation has revealed that the Ministry of Defence are using the closure of the bogus Iraq Historic Allegations Team (IHAT) ​as an opportunity to​ shut down a completely separate Royal Military Police (RMP) investigation into ​the conduct of SAS kill/capture missions.

The IHAT enquiry squandered taxpayers’ money and amounted to a betrayal of British servicemen and women by the ministry responsible for safeguarding them. Based on my own experiences in Rahim, I believe the RMP investigation is warranted and should be allowed to proceed. Former Army Captain and MP for Plymouth Moor View, Johnny Mercer, agrees “We must be very clear that unlawful behaviour is not acceptable. I hope that my efforts to protect our servicemen and women from spurious claims have not been used as cover to legitimise unprofessional behaviour on operations.”

Even in war, soldiers are not above the law and it seemed to me that, all too often in Afghanistan, Special Forces were not subject to the oversight of the military chain of command or the law of armed conflict.

My account of the incident is reproduced below:

“It was an extraordinary tale but not an improbable one. Night raids were commonplace in Afghanistan and Haji was not the first person, nor would he be the last, to receive a visitation from Special Operations Forces in the middle of the night. As with everything in the secretive world of SOF it was difficult to know precise details. But a US military source told researchers for the Open Society Foundation in April 2011 that as many as 40 raids were being carried out every night. Jon Nagel, a former member of Petreus’ staff described them as “an industrial strength counter-terrorism killing machine”.

This sounded most impressive but Mr Nagel appeared to be fighting the wrong war. We were supposed to be conducting a counter-insurgency, not a counter-terrorism campaign. Perhaps I was splitting hairs but Mr Nagel really should have known the difference because his own boss had re-written the counter-insurgency manual to great acclaim and fanfare.

In it Petreus had mandated: “Legitimacy is the Main Objective.” Impressed, no doubt, by British military doctrine writers’ ability to use a dozen words where half that number would have sufficed he went on to state:

“The best counter‑insurgency campaigns integrate and synchronise political, security, economic, and informational components that reinforce governmental legitimacy and effectiveness while reducing insurgent influence over the population. COIN strategies should be designed to simultaneously protect the population from insurgent violence; strengthen the legitimacy and capacity of government institutions to govern responsibly and marginalise insurgents politically, socially, and economically.”There was no mention of an industrial strength killing machine in any of the manual’s 242 pages.

Unsurprisingly night raids singularly failed to reduce insurgent influence over the population or to demonstrate the legitimacy of our cause. In fact there was plenty to suggest that they were having the directly opposite effect.

Towards the end of our tour a night raid in Rahim, conducted by a joint TF196 and Afghan Special Forces team, resulted in three brothers being gunned down in their compound in front of their wives and children.

Again I found myself in conflict with British Tier One Special Forces. TF196 insisted the men were insurgents, but this claim seemed highly improbable to me. The brothers’ compound was just a short distance from one of our patrol bases and any suspicious activity would almost certainly have come to our attention. Our own J2 Shop had nothing on the men. The general consensus from our analysts was that the SAS, while ruthlessly efficient as always, had directed their special talents against the wrong targets.

When I challenged a TF196 spokesman on their version of events he played their top secret joker once more. Speaking to me by phone from an undisclosed location he said the information was classified. As a known Taliban‑loving apologist and mere part‑time soldier I could not be trusted and had no authority to contradict elite tier one special forces. A short while later I received another telephone call from the charming colonel in Task Force Helmand ordering me to drop my line of enquiry. Although he remained amiable I detected a hardening in his tone.

The TFH top brass had silenced me, but the Rahim spin zhiras remained determinedly voluble on the subject. They steadfastly maintained the brothers’ innocence and were outraged at the brutal executions in front of the victims’ families. Emissaries were despatched to the patrol base threatening retaliation and demanding an apology and blood money for the relatives. The PB Commander was bitterly angry that the raid had gone ahead without his knowledge, destroying the work his own men had done over the previous six months to marginalise the Taliban and protect the population from insurgent violence.

Shortly after we completed our tour the Rahim patrol base was abandoned and Afghan National Security Forces ceded control of the area to the Taliban. Perhaps these events were not linked to the slaying of the supposed insurgents but, given the long memories of our Afghan hosts, this seemed unlikely to me. Our actions had done nothing to strengthen the legitimacy of the GIRoA government as the Petreus COIN Field Manual had directed.’

Max Hill QC stated in the Independent yesterday that terror laws should be scrapped and there should not be any prosecutions for ‘thought crimes’.Dr Adnan Siddiqui, CAGE Director said:

“Max Hill is right to call for the end to all terror laws in this country. The Independent Reviewers comments come as a welcome break from a norm that has allowed this politicised corpus of law to continue to expand. The criminal justice system is adequate without entrenching Emergency laws that were intended only to be a temporary measure. A ‘state of exception’ has instead led to the normalisation of emergency powers over 17 years through 14 separate pieces of legislation.”

“CAGE reiterates its June announcement: We call for an abolition of the extensive web of laws that have ensnared our fundamental freedoms and rights. We call upon all right minded people to join our struggle to establish once again the Rule of Law and apply it to all irrespective of their background, race or religion.”

TRUMP HAS ALREADY KILLED MORE CIVILIANS THAN OBAMA IN U.S. FIGHT AGAINST ISIS

BY TOM O'CONNOR ON 8/22/17

The U.S.-led coalition fighting the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) has killed more civilians during President Donald Trump's first seven months in office than in the three years it existed under his predecessor, according to the latest estimate by a U.K.-based monitor.

Airwars, which describes itself as a "journalist-led transparency project," released Tuesday its latest data on airstrikes reportedly conducted by the U.S. and its allies battling ISIS and other jihadists in Iraq and Syria. According to data gathered since the coalition's inception in October 2014, the U.S.-dominated multinational force has been responsible for a minimum of 5,117 civilian deaths, with about 55 percent of them occurring during Trump's administration. While the stage of the conflict inherited by the Republican leader has largely involved targeting ISIS's urban strongholds after allied gains elsewhere under former President Barack Obama, Trump has faced backlash at home and abroad over reports of mounting collateral damage.

"In @realDonaldTrump's first 7 months as President, we tracked 1,196 alleged incidents in which we assess at least 2,819-4,529 civilians died," it added.

The U.S. began conducting airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq and Syria in October 2014 as part of what came to be known as the Joint Combined Task Force–Operation Inherent Resolve. The campaign was created in response to lightning gains made across Iraq and Syria by ISIS, a notoriously brutal and powerful offshoot of Al-Qaeda in Iraq. The ultraconservative Sunni Muslim group managed to overpower local forces and expanded its self-proclaimed caliphate across nearly half of the two countries.

The group's lines of defense began to collapse in Iraq as it was targeted by the country's armed forces, Kurdish militias, majority-Shiite Muslim militias backed by Iran and U.S.-led airstrikes. In Syria, U.S. airstrikes assisted the local Kurdish forces and some Arab insurgent groups in taking on the jihadists, while a 2015 Russian intervention allowed Syria's embattled military and its allies, including Iran-backed militias, to retake large parts of the country lost to ISIS and other anti-government groups in the wake of a 2011 uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Russian President Vladimir Putin and Assad have also been criticized for reports of high civilian casualties incurred by their joint air campaigns.

When Trump came into office in January, U.S. forces had already begun major offensives to help local allies dislodge ISIS from two of its most important cities. Since then, the Iraqi government has declared ISIS defeated in Mosul, by far the largest city to fall into the jihadists' hands, and the Syrian Democratic Forces, a mostly Kurdish alliance of Arabs and ethnic minorities, has beaten ISIS in about half of its de facto capital of Raqqa. As the two campaigns became increasingly urban, civilian casualties increased substantially. In last month's report, Airwars said that about 80 civilians were killed per month under Obama and that that figure had risen to 360 under Trump by July.

INSTITUTE FOR THE STUDY OF WAR/REUTERS

Other monitoring groups have also criticized the increasingly deadly consequences of the U.S.-led intervention against ISIS. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a U.K.-based group with ties to the exiled Syrian opposition, said Monday that coalition airstrikes had escalated in the past week, killing 167 people, with at least 42 dead reported from a single airstrike that day.

"Such massacres only add to the deteriorating humanitarian situation of civilians in ISIS-controlled areas in Raqqa city, where death became inevitable awaiting even those who try to flee along with their families to areas far from the doomed city," the group wrote.

From Myanmar to Aleppo, the ‘War on Terror’ has become a convenient excuse for genocide

Posted by CAGE on December 16, 2016

In a video from within besieged Aleppo, US journalist Bilal Abdul Karim said “don’t you dare fall for anybody who is telling you that what is happening here in Aleppo is that they are fighting terrorists and terrorism”. He reiterated the call on Tuesday night as he spoke live from Aleppo to a crowd of at least a thousand protesters in London. His call has highlighted a worrying trend, whereby genocide is justified under the banner of the War on Terror. The broad scope of terrorism legislation has provided governments with a carte blanche to weaponise the War on Terror against their own people.

The suffering of the Rohingya extends beyond the modern political context, however, in its efforts to polish its image, the Myanmar government has co-opted the manifesto of the War on Terror, to continue its acts of barbarity against the Rohingya.

US builds ties with Burmese government and military

In May this year, US officials announced they would be gradually re-engaging with the country’s military, “with the aim of broadening cooperation” including ‘counter-terrorism’. However when pressed on the Rohingya issue, Deputy Secretary of State Patrick Murphy, said it was “problematic”. “It’s a lot to ask of a new government,” he said apologetically, of the need to solve what is a catastrophic human problem.

Recently in a low key email, Obama announced the lifting of sanctions against Myanmar, saying, unbelievably, that the government there had made “substantial progress in improving human rights”.
A western precedent

Such responses in the face of impending genocide are unlikely to change under the Islamophobic administration of Donald Trump. In fact, it is likely that Burma, in its institutional racism and state sponsored hate and genocide against a persecuted minority, will enjoy even more open support, while those drawing attention to the plight of the Rohingya may be cast as “extremist” or “terrorist sympathisers”.

Killing in the name of counter-terrorism such as that which is occurring in Myanmar and Aleppo, is a stark warning that the abuses sanctioned by western nations under the War on Terror have set dangerous precedents and have enabled some of the world’s’ most reprehensible regimes to commit genocide with impunity.https://cage.ngo/article/from-myanma...-for-genocide/

The Pentagon sent a US veteran of the "dirty wars" in Central America to oversee sectarian police commando units in Iraq that set up secret detention andtorture centres to get information from insurgents. These units conducted some of the worst acts of torture during the US occupation and accelerated the country's descent into full-scale civil war.

Colonel James Steele was a 58-year-old retired special forces veteran when he was nominated by Donald Rumsfeld to help organise the paramilitaries in an attempt to quell a Sunni insurgency, an investigation by the Guardian and BBC Arabic shows.

After the Pentagon lifted a ban on Shia militias joining the security forces, the special police commando (SPC) membership was increasingly drawn from violent Shia groups such as the Badr brigades.

A second special adviser, retired Colonel James H Coffman, worked alongside Steele in detention centres that were set up with millions of dollars of US funding.

Coffman reported directly to General David Petraeus, sent to Iraq in June 2004 to organise and train the new Iraqi security forces. Steele, who was in Iraq from 2003 to 2005, and returned to the country in 2006, reported directly to Rumsfeld.

The allegations, made by US and Iraqi witnesses in the Guardian/BBC documentary, implicate US advisers for the first time in the human rights abuses committed by the commandos. It is also the first time that Petraeus – who last November was forced to resign as director of the CIA after a sex scandal – has been linked through an adviser to this abuse.

Coffman reported to Petraeus and described himself in an interview with the US military newspaper Stars and Stripes as Petraeus's "eyes and ears out on the ground" in Iraq.

"They worked hand in hand," said General Muntadher al-Samari, who worked with Steele and Coffman for a year while the commandos were being set up. "I never saw them apart in the 40 or 50 times I saw them inside the detention centres. They knew everything that was going on there ... the torture, the most horrible kinds of torture."

Additional Guardian reporting has confirmed more details of how the interrogation system worked. "Every single detention centre would have its own interrogation committee," claimed Samari, talking for the first time in detail about the US role in the interrogation units.

"Each one was made up of an intelligence officer and eight interrogators. This committee will use all means of torture to make the detainee confess like using electricity or hanging him upside down, pulling out their nails, and beating them on sensitive parts."

There is no evidence that Steele or Coffman tortured prisoners themselves, only that they were sometimes present in the detention centres where torture took place and were involved in the processing of thousands of detainees.

The Guardian/BBC Arabic investigation was sparked by the release of classified US military logs on WikiLeaks that detailed hundreds of incidents where US soldiers came across tortured detainees in a network of detention centres run by the police commandos across Iraq. Private Bradley Manning, 25, is facing a prison sentence of up to 20 years after he pleaded guilty to leaking the documents.

Samari claimed that torture was routine in the SPC-controlled detention centres. "I remember a 14-year-old who was tied to one of the library's columns. And he was tied up, with his legs above his head. Tied up. His whole body was blue because of the impact of the cables with which he had been beaten."

Gilles Peress, a photographer, came across Steele when he was on assignment for the New York Times, visiting one of the commando centres in the same library, in Samarra. "We were in a room in the library interviewing Steele and I'm looking around I see blood everywhere."

The reporter Peter Maass was also there, working on the story with Peress. "And while this interview was going on with a Saudi jihadi with Jim Steele also in the room, there were these terrible screams, somebody shouting: 'Allah, Allah, Allah!' But it wasn't kind of religious ecstasy or something like that, these were screams of pain and terror."

The pattern in Iraq provides an eerie parallel to the well-documented human rights abuses committed by US-advised and funded paramilitary squads in Central America in the 1980s. Steele was head of a US team of special military advisers that trained units of El Salvador's security forces in counterinsurgency. Petraeus visited El Salvador in 1986 while Steele was there and became a major advocate of counterinsurgency methods.

Steele has not responded to any questions from the Guardian and BBC Arabic about his role in El Salvador or Iraq. He has in the past denied any involvement in torture and said publicly he is "opposed to human rights abuses." Coffman declined to comment.

An official speaking for Petraeus said: "During the course of his years in Iraq, General Petraeus did learn of allegations of Iraqi forces torturing detainees. In each incident, he shared information immediately with the US military chain of command, the US ambassador in Baghdad ... and the relevant Iraqi leaders."

The Guardian has learned that the SPC units' involvement with torture entered the popular consciousness in Iraq when some of their victims were paraded in front of a TV audience on a programme called "Terrorism In The Hands of Justice."

SPC detention centres bought video cameras, funded by the US military, which they used to film detainees for the show. When the show began to outrage the Iraqi public, Samari remembers being in the home of General Adnan Thabit – head of the special commandos – when a call came from Petraeus's office demanding that they stop showing tortured men on TV.

"General Petraeus's special translator, Sadi Othman, rang up to pass on a message from General Petraeus telling us not to show the prisoners on TV after they had been tortured," said Samari. "Then 20 minutes later we got a call from the Iraqi ministry of interior telling us the same thing, that General Petraeus didn't want the torture victims shown on TV."

Othman, who now lives in New York, confirmed that he made the phone call on behalf of Petraeus to the head of the SPC to ask him to stop showing the tortured prisoners. "But General Petraeus does not agree with torture," he added. "To suggest he does support torture is horseshit."

Thabit is dismissive of the idea that the Americans he dealt with were unaware of what the commandos were doing. "Until I left, the Americans knew about everything I did; they knew what was going on in the interrogations and they knew the detainees. Even some of the intelligence about the detainees came to us from them – they are lying."

Just before Petraeus and Steele left Iraq in September 2005, Jabr al-Solagh was appointed as the new minister of the interior. Under Solagh, who was closely associated with the violent Badr Brigades militia, allegations of torture and brutality by the commandos soared. It was also widely believed that the units had evolved into death squads.

The Guardian has learned that high-ranking Iraqis who worked with the US after the invasion warned Petraeus of the consequences of appointing Solagh but their pleas were ignored.

The long-term impact of funding and arming this paramilitary force was to unleash a deadly sectarian militia that terrorised the Sunni community and helped germinate a civil war that claimed tens of thousands of lives. At the height of that sectarian conflict, 3,000 bodies a month were strewn on the streets of Iraq.

CV: James Steele

Vietnam

Jim Steele's first experience of war was in Vietnam, where from 1965 to 1975 US combat units were deployed against the communist North Vietnamese government and Viet Cong. 58,000 Americans were killed, dealing a blow to the nation's self-esteem and leading to a change in military thinking for subsequent conflicts.

El Salvador

A 1979 military coup plunged the smallest country in Central America into civil war and drew in US training and funding on the side of the rightwing government. From 1984 to 1986 Steele – a "counterinsurgency specialist" – was head of the US MilGroup of US special forces advisers to frontline battalions of the Salvadorean military, which developed a fearsome international reputation for its death-squad activities. Prof Terry Karl, an expert at Stanford University on El Salvador's civil war, said that Steele's main aim was to shift the fight from so-called total war, which then meant the indiscriminate murder of thousands of civilians, to a more "discriminate" approach. One of his tasks was to put more emphasis on "human intelligence" and interrogation.

He became involved in the Iran-Contra affair, which saw the proceeds from covert arms sales by senior US officials to Iran used to fund the Contras, rightwing guerrillas fighting Daniel Ortega's leftwing Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Steele ran operations at El Salvador's Ilopango airport, from where Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North illegally ran weapons and supplies to the Contras.

Iraq

Soon after the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, now retired Colonel James Steele was in Baghdad as one of the White House's most important agents, sending back reports to Donald Rumsfeld and acting as the US defence secretary's personal envoy to Iraq's Special Police Commandos, whose intelligence-gathering activities he oversaw. Drawn mostly from violent Shia militia, thecommandos developed a reputation for torture and later for their death-squad activities directed against the Sunni community.

George Bush's brand of "war on terror" has spread internationally as a favourite tool to cover up of war crimes.

There's a playbook for committing atrocities and being absolved of them. It wasn't written byGeorge W Bush, now a retired painter of dogs in the US state of Texas, but it was popularised and legitimised by his administration at the dawn of the 21st century. And the world today, with its multiple bloody wars on terror fought by allies and foes of Washington alike, sometimes begrudgingly together, reflects this bequeathment.

Terrorism is a useful foe. Wars against it need not be declared, and combatants need not be defined. Traditional warfare, with a uniformed opponent, brings with it the not always avoidable bureaucracy of international law; lawyers saying you can't shoot this or that. No conflict is outside the law, at least on paper. However, an amorphous tactic can't file a petition at The Hague, and when every power of note is on the same page with respect to the need to kill shadowy non-state actors, extrajudicially, it's smart statecraft to adopt the rubric of the war on terror, with modern flourishes.

"Fake news". That's the new line in 2017, deployed by Nobel laureate and leader of Myanmar Aung San Suu Kyi on September 6 to characterise reports of mass murder against the Rohingya people, a mostly Muslim ethnic minority considered unworthy of legal rights by her government. Nearly a quarter-million people have fled largely Buddhist Myanmar in the last year, over half in the last two weeks following a crackdown by security forces engaged in a claimed war against Islamic terror.

Thousands have been killed, with refugees and journalists on the ground reporting horrific scenes: mobs and Myanmar's armed forces burning down Rohingya villages, those who aren't killed driven away by the tens of thousands to Bangladesh, another country whose government doesn't want them, and only then if they can get by the landmines placed along the border by the military that's exterminating them.

These accounts are widespread, but those who wish to defend the perpetrators of such acts are savvy: they don't defend them, but rather dwell on the typos they find in a war crimes indictment. That means reserving the thrust of one's anger for those who circulate misinformation, a problem during any conflict - apologists for the Khmer Rouge, some still active today, indicted the mainstream narrative about mass death in revolutionary Cambodia by noting The Washington Post's publication of fake photos - but one made all the easier in an unverifiable age of instantaneity.
Aung San Suu Kyi blamed "terrorists" for sharing those photos today. It's "simply the tip of the iceberg of misinformation," she said in a Facebook post, "with the aim of promoting the interests of terrorists," an unsurprising goal for misinforming terrorists. The dull math of a war on a terror (them vs us = whose side are you on?) does not allow for much artistic freelancing, so redundancy may be excused.

Russian state media, representing a government that sells arms to Myanmar, appears to just be repeating stock footage. According to Sputnik and RT, George Soros, the billionaire financier, is the wealthy Jew behind this new war, apparently in search of another bloody pipeline - mirroring the conspiratorial explanation for revolution-turned-war in Syria. On Global Research, a pro-Russia Infowars for a conspiracy-mongering left, one may read that "Saudi jihadists" are behind the crisis.

Bush, likewise, blamed everything but his own actions for the insurgency in Iraq. "No act of ours invited the rage of the killers," he told the National Endowment for Democracy in 2005. Rather, "Islamic radicalism," he said during the height of attacks on US troops, is enabled by "allies of convenience like Syria and Iran that share the goal of hurting America," and "use terrorist propaganda" to magnify the impact of their support.

In that, Bush wasn't all wrong: Syria did indeed facilitate the transit of jihadists to Iraq. That led the Bush administration to send terror suspects to Damascus, where they were dutifully tortured, even as the US president admonished the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Iran, too, aided Iraqi insurgents, but neither government created the insurgency: the 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation did that. Now, today, both Tehran and Damascus echo the war on terror rhetoric of old, blaming the insurgency in Syria on outside actors - in the case of Iran, actors other than themselves - while denying any agency or cause to those fighting them.

Part of it is there are only so many forms that apologism for war crimes can take; the practice necessitates imitation and repetition. A cartoon that originates in Israel, depicting an Israeli soldier protecting a mother while an armed Palestinian hides behind one, has been repurposed by those who preach resistance to Israeli aggression, shared by partisans of Syria's Assad as well as Egypt's Sisi, both of whom are waging self-styled wars on terror in need of excuses for civilian deaths. On Twitter, where hearts and minds are now won, a similar cartoon has been rolled out by supporters of Myanmar's genocidal military.

These supporters are echoing governments whose intent is not just to justify, to their own choir, but to attract new and more powerful support - from other states. Assad, for example, has made resistance to US imperialism key to his brand, blaming it for the insurgency that developed after he tried to bomb and torture his way out of reform. But asked about his own support for the "so-called American war on terrorism" under Bush, when "Syria used to help the CIA in the rendition programme and interrogating and torturing people," he didn't even challenge the terminology.
Syria, he said, has long called for "international cooperation to fight terrorism," he said. "That's why we've always been ready to help and cooperate with any country that wants to fight terrorism. And for that reason, we helped the Americans, and we are always ready to join any country which is sincere about fighting terrorism."

There's always a fight over what constitutes terrorism and who is a terrorist, but by framing their internal conflicts as a war on terror, one makes a familiar appeal to a built-in audience. Mentioning "Islamists" and its variants triggers a Pavlovian alt-morality: the mass murder happens in the context of a recognisable, civilisational struggle, enabling greater acceptance of casualty counts while increasing the chance of killing, cooperatively, alongside the globe's leading powers. When the US government finally made good on a threat to bomb Syria, those bombs fell on just about everyone but the regime and its allies, friendly fire and a bruised runway aside.

As US President Donald Trump, asked about the Assad regime's repeated use of chemical weapons, explained at a September 7 press conference, "We have very little to do with Syria, other than killing ISIS." While the regime is responsible for the majority of civilian dead, "What we do is kill ISIS," which, of course, means killing more civilians still.

A war on extremism can't be won on propaganda and military might alone - an insurgency, defeated, is often resurrected, more extremely, when the grievances it exploits aren't remedied. But the war on terror logic and rhetoric spreads with the imprimatur of the US and its official enemies, confusing those whose politics are based on reflexive and binary opposition to one or the other. It spreads in part because states that commit acts of state terrorism can exploit an international system which values the sovereign right of states to terrorise much more than people and their rights.

Every terroriser with a seat at the UN has learned the tune, and the wars keep humming along. Bush's regime change in Iraq gave rise to the forces and political dynamics that would make stability and a regime's preservation the overriding concern of left, right and centre. As hundreds of thousands of dead civilians and thousands more living through war crimes can attest, from Yemen to Syria and Iraq to Myanmar, the "war on terror" has won.

Another beating snuff video shames coalition of the killing, You Tube censors it

Paul Joseph Watson - November 17, 2006
British troops punch, beat and kick pleading Iraqi children as a sadistic comrade films the brutal scenes of torture, laughing, screaming, growling and frothing like a serial killer filming a snuff movie.

This is why the Iraqis hate us.

Iraqi children throw rocks as they flee from running British troops, are grabbed, brought inside a gate and beaten half to death. Watch the video below. The censorship spies at You Tube rejected it 2 minutes after upload so I re-named it "Fluffy Happy Poodles In Heaven," to try and bypass their keyword filters and it was still rejected. I even renamed the actual 'wmv' filename but it was still blocked for "terms of use violation." I finally managed to get it posted on Google Video. If it disappears again, here's the Windows Media link on our server. November 19th: Google removed the video too! .

"Oh yes! Oh Yes! You're gonna get it!" snarls the cameraman.

"Yes! Naughty little boys."

He laughs as they boys begin to scream out in pain, "Yes!"

He then takes on the tone of a demented serial killer, grunting and growling, "Yeeeeeesss, yeeeeeessss," as troops punch and kick the children.

He mocks the cries of the boys, "No please don't hurt me," laughs again and then proceeds to begin frothing in some kind of insane carnal bloodlust, "Motherfuckers, you little fuckers - die!"

Adult Iraqis are brought in and similarly assaulted - the video ends.

A probe of this video led to the arrest of the cameraman, Cpl Martin Webster, but after that the investigation seemingly went nowhere and was swept under the rug.

Originally leaked in February this year, this is just the latest in a long line of "trophy videos" that expose the true face of what the troops have been trained and ordered to do in Iraq, dominate, brutalize and enslave the population - and it's why nearly 3,000 have come home in flag-draped coffins.

This is why the Iraqis hate us.

- A CNN clip from the early days of the "liberation" shows U.S. troops finishing off an injured Iraqi. The tape cuts to an interview with one of the soldiers who states, "Like, man, you guys are dead now, you know. But it was a good feeling. I mean, afterwards you're like, hell, yeah, that was awesome. Let's do it again."

- In another clip the soldier exclaims, "Hell yeah bitches," as he audibly orgasms as the scene of carnage before him - a missile slamming into a nearby building. "I got all that **** on camera."

- U.S. troops in a convoy drive vehicles down an Iraqi highway and bemoan the fact that they are not allowed to gun down children who throw rocks at them.

- Bloodthirsty security guards and contractors hang out the back of trucks and randomly execute Iraqis driving in vehicles behind them.

These are just some of the videos that have been leaked onto the Internet. Now we know that the policy to abuse and torture innocent Iraqis just to show them who the bosses were was implicit, how many more of these kind of incidents have happened over the past three and a half years but not been videotaped by salivating zombies?

This is why the Iraqis hate us.

No one is suggesting that U.S. troops should roll over like a poodle if someone is shooting at them - they have every right to shoot back no matter what your view on the war is. The rubicon is crossed when petty thieves, children who throw rocks or completely innocent people are brutalized without recourse and the one thing that betrays the true nature of it all is the sadistic reaction of the protagonists who enjoy the torture, the beatings and the death.

Most of these individuals were brought up on a steady diet of first person shoot-em-ups, and they have overlaid the mental perception that the video games taught them on how to treat death. Distanced and emotionless, the troops see random slaughter and torture as a stress reliever, a means of letting off some steam - and it's all sanctioned from the very top.

This is why the Iraqis hate us.

The assumption that Iraq is now liberated and that its people have suffered for the glorious opportunity of seeing democracy and freedom flourish throughout their country is the last thread the Neo-Cons are hanging onto as claims of weapons of mass destruction and Al-Qaeda ties evaporated long ago. Yet to claim Iraq is liberated is the most absurd of any of the justifications for going to war or "staying the course."

Every cornerstone of what one would consider to be basic rights in a free society, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, right to fair judicial process, right to be secure from unlawful searches and seizures in one's home, have been abolished in Iraq. The occupation makes the regime of Saddam Hussein look like post-revolution America.

This is why the Iraqis hate us.

I guess the Iraqi children should feel lucky in that they got their retaliation in first by throwing rocks, many are simply arrested, hooded and taken to the torture camp for refusing to show ID at checkpoints. It's good to see that the authorities are not hypocrites and that the same kind of law enforcement techniques are practiced here at home, as Mostafa Tabatabainejad can attest to, the student was tortured for refusing to show his ID to UCLA police in a campus library.

The fun will continue when the same kind of barbarous fiends who get orgasmic pleasure from watching children being tortured come back home and become our police.

US Coalition Admits Using Chemical Weapons Against Civilians in Iraq — Media Silent

Earlier this month, multiple reports surfaced of US-led coalition forces in Mosul, Iraq and Raqqa, Syria, using the incendiary chemical weapon, white phosphorus, on civilians. For over a week, the US government and the coalition at large have remained silent on the issue — until now.

In an error that will likely get him much backlash, in an interview with NPR, New Zealand Brig. Gen. Hugh McAslan, and member of the US-coalition has admitted — for the first time — to using white phosphorus during operations in the Iraqi city of Mosul.

“We have utilized white phosphorous to screen areas within West Mosul to get civilians out safely,” McAslan told NPR on Tuesday.

Instead of questioning the horrid nature of the chemical weapons use on civilians, NPR echoed the general’s sentiment and noted that 28,000 civilians have managed to escape. While that may be true, countless others were injured or suffered horrifying deaths.

White phosphorus is described as an “incendiary and toxic chemical substance used as a filler in a number of different munitions that can be employed for a variety of military purposes.”

The chemical was banned internationally after the 1980 Protocol on Incendiary Weapons restricted the “use of incendiary weapons as a means or method of warfare during armed conflict.”

The use of chemical weapons is clearly prohibited in international armed conflicts. The International Committee of the Red Cross noted that “employing asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases, and all analogous liquids, materials or devices is listed in the Statute of the International Criminal Court as a war crime.”

While deploying incendiary weapons against residential areas is banned under Protocol III of the Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW), the two other uses — smoke screens and signals — are not, which allows the hypocritical US, to keep such munitions in their arsenal and use them. It is through this loophole that the US claims the right to deploy these deadly weapons on towns.

On November 30, 2005, General Peter Pace stated that white phosphorus munitions were a “legitimate tool of the military” used to illuminate targets and create smokescreens, saying “It is not a chemical weapon. It is an incendiary.” However, the general is wrong. As soon as white phosphorus is deployed against people, it becomes a chemical weapon.

A chemical weapon can be “any chemical which through its chemical action on life processes can cause death, temporary incapacitation or permanent harm.”

White phosphorus remains very dangerous even when not deliberately used to start fires or attack humans. Submunitions can ignite days after deployment and remain a hazard for a city. Injuries caused by the chemical can burn to the bone and are prone to reigniting if a piece of the phosphorus remaining in the wound is exposed to air when a dressing is changed.

“No matter how white phosphorus is used, it poses a high risk of horrific and long-lasting harm in crowded cities like Raqqa and Mosul and any other areas with concentrations of civilians,” said Steve Goose, arms director at Human Rights Watch.

The US claims of using white phosphorus as a smoke screen or signal ring hollow when assessing the damage reported on the ground in Syria and Iraq.

Just as the rights groups warned, civilian casualties were, in fact, a reality from the coalition’s deployment of white phosphorus.

Xinhua News, China’s state press agency, reported last week that “Tens of civilians were killed on Thursday when the U.S.-led airstrikes targeted Syria’s northern city of Raqqa with white phosphorus,” citing a report from Syria’s Sham FM radio.

Russia’s Riafan.ru reported that “Coalition forces led by the United States of America shell Raqqa and suburbs of white phosphorus munitions,” citing reports on Twitter, which said the U.S.-backed coalition conducted 20 air raids.

Although the total number of civilian deaths has not been entirely confirmed, early reports suggest that nearly 50 people were killed.

“Horrific civilian harm from previous use of white phosphorus has generated public outrage and this latest use of white phosphorus underscores the urgent need for states to strengthen international law relating to incendiary weapons,” HRW’s Goose said.

Although NPR happened to have the general admit to them US forces are using white phosphorus, no other mainstream outlet in America has picked up this bombshell story.

Their silence shows their complicit nature in covering up the alleged war crimes of the West.

“US-led forces should take all feasible precautions to minimize civilian harm when using white phosphorus in Iraq and Syria,” Goose said of the situation. However, from the reports on the ground, that appears not to be the case.

In the video below, the US-led coalition is dropping white phosphorus bombs on Western Mosul. Watch for yourself and decide whether or not it was being used as a ‘tool’ to allow civilians to escape.